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ADDS THOMAS BARLOW, a? flood specialist for the Washington-based ecology group called the Natural Resources Defense Council; “The East Coast has been hit by three 100-year floods in the last seven years . . . What we’re up against is a water bureaucracy. It’s a phenomenal foul up in hydraulics.
“We’ve got urban builders blacktopping everything and hastening runoff through packed suburbs. Out in the countryside, we’ve got the Soil Conservation Service bulldozing ditches and channelizing swamps to speed still more water downstream. And at the end we have the Corps of Engineers with dams and levees that can’t hold it all.”*
Barlow went on: “During the urbanization process, many swamps and depressions are drained and storm-sewered into the main channels. As rooftops, streets and parking lots replace croplands, pasture and woods, the rate and volume of rainfall which runs off the land increases.”
He suggested that the best way to control flood damage was to prevent building in flood plains — a lesson so strikingly simple that it apparently owerwhelms local lawmakers.
And as to existing problems, there is the example of Henrico County, right here in Virginia, where several blocks of houses regularly hit by flood waters were simply bought up. It’s a lot cheaper, and less agonizing, in the long run.
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